Director of DC-CAM Should Not Support Sham
Recently, the Director of DC-CAM, Youk Chhang, expressed his support of Loung Ung and her book "First They Killed My Father" by enthusiastically encouraging its translation into Khmer and, according to a U.S. newspaper, receiving $15,000 to do so. As a person whose job is to collect and preserve evidence against the Khmer Rouge, Youk Chhang should be more vigilant in discerning fact from fiction. Rather than supporting this book, Youk Chhang should help protect the integrity of legitimate accounts of the Khmer Rouge experience by renouncing something so riddled with inaccuracies and fabrications.
Instead of providing more "evidence" against the Khmer Rouge, Ung has taken advantage of the Cambodian tragedy to sell her story. She was only five years old when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, yet purports to remember her experience well enough to write an historically accurate book. While this is certainly not impossible, the author's narration itself proves that she in fact does not possess a vivid memory of 1970s Cambodia, only a vivid imagination. Her alleged memories of life before and during the Khmer Rouge period are so riddled with inconsistencies, improbabilities and manifestly incorrect information as to be utterly illegitimate - which makes the book little more than poor fiction and its author an opportunistic con-artist.
Ung's description of Phnom Penh in 1975 just before the fall, for example, is completely devoid of the real sense of chaos and fear that the Cambodian people felt. In her narration, the author fails to mention the multitude of refugees who flooded Phnom Penh to escape the fighting in the countryside. Instead, while the Khmer Rouge were raining mortar shells onto the city and people were literally starving to death, Ung's story describes what sounds like present-day Phnom Penh and the author depicts her family's posh lifestyle in a manner that would make an uninformed reader think their three cars and multiple house servants was the norm for the time. If Ung's memory is so precise as to qualify her to write a memoir, then she should have recalled and recounted the pervading poverty and pandemonium observed by reporters and other individuals who resided in Phnom Penh just before the Khmer Rouge takeover.
To sensationalize the story, the author describes events that are in all likelihood completely fictitious, such her memory of a family vacation to the temple of Angkor Wat in 1974. First, such a trip would have been unreasonably dangerous at that time due to the war. Secondly, the photo placed in the book of this alleged trip shows Ung's older sister as a toddler and her mother as pregnant at the time. The author must possess extraordinary pre-natal memory to be able to "remember" this vacation. And this is not her only super power: Ung also claims that as a malnourished seven-year-old child she handled and fired an AK-47 and, in a separate incident, physically overpowered a Vietnamese combat soldier.
In addition to these implausible exploits, Ung frequently misrepresents Khmer culture in her book as well. Her description of an alleged "Cambodian" tradition of passing out red envelopes stuffed with money during New Years, for instance, is completely erroneous. And it is doubtful the traditional Cambodian New Years attire she describes - a red, chiffon dress - is a very popular item at Psah Thmey in April.
The most offensive aspect of Ung's book is the racism inherent in her attempts to demonize ethnic Khmers. To make her story more compelling, she insinuates that only light-skinned Sino-Khmers such as herself were victims of the Khmer Rouge and that most dark-skinned ethnic Khmers are somehow to blame for the heinous crimes of the Killing Fields period. Ung even uses the term "ethnic cleansing." To make such a claim is misleading, hurtful and dangerous because it causes readers to misunderstand the Killing Fields period as one of ethnic conflict when the truth is that the Killing Fields was about Communist fanaticism taken to an extreme. Everyone, Chinese-Cambodians and Khmers alike, were victims of this fanaticism. A UN report on Khmer Rouge atrocities published in 1999 noted Cambodians were persecuted for a variety of things - being educated, religious, part of the old regime, etc. - but it noted no special targeting of Cambodians for simply being of Chinese descent. On the contrary, the report specifically rejected this claim. That the Khmer Rouge were a group of individuals who were primarily destroying and murdering their own people in fact inspired the coining of the expression "auto-genocide" to describe the Killing Fields.
Ung's misrepresentation is harmful because it promotes racism and ethnic tension within the Cambodian community and in a sense denies the suffering of millions of Cambodians who were themselves hapless victims of the Khmer Rouge's draconian policies. The Khmer people as a whole have suffered enough that they should not have to now also deal with being demonized and accused of perpetuating the awful crimes of the Killing Fields period when most were themselves victims of these crimes. Ethnic minorities within Cambodia have suffered enough that they should be told the true cause of their suffering - societal inequality, corruption, and international dynamics that helped bring to power a paranoid and fanatic Communist regime.
Ung writes in her book that a woman once told her she would never amount to anything unless she prostituted herself. By profiting from this sham she has not only arguably prostituted her own story but the suffering of millions of Cambodians as well. The director of DC-CAM should not as act as her pimp and facilitate her lies and sensationalism. Youk Chhang, please do not sacrifice legitimacy and integrity for something as trivial as publicity and a mere $15,000.
An in-depth analysis of Ung's book can be found in the articles section of the Khmer Institute's website (www.khmerinstitute.org). The article will give readers a better understanding of the injustice that the author does to the memory of 1.7 million people who died in the Killing Fields.
Sody Lay
Lecturer, UCLA
Executive Director, Khmer Institute
